‘Space cleaner’ satellite spotted grabbing and throwing away old satellite

Did you miss that it's a republished DW article?

I think it'd be cool AF if we built a space city on the moon that actually handled the majority of space mission builds and even launches. We'd still need to launch from here to get materials and people there, but once there ....astronauts could train etc....perhaps the building people live in could spin or something to give the guise of gravity, and everyone could wear waited outfits too, it'd also be a place for scientists to experiment w/ anti-gravity tech maybe...

I really think space mining should also be a thing, and would love to see drones that build more drones for mining, and building stuff as well as bigger and bigger telescopes further and further from earth and in places that are better blocked out by the Sun, like orbiting Saturn or something so maybe when it's facing the sun it refills it's battery and when it's in the dark zone it is taking photos...

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"China is providing mitigation against Kessler syndrome. Here's why this is Bad."

Domain is .in, you didn't have to open it.

IMHO, space is big + satellites are hard to track, if they're highly-maneuverable or designed to be stealthy = possibility of launching untracked microsatellites that couple with space assets and wait for activation

Critically, add in the fact that most space-based assets are likely several years, or even decades old, and designed to minimize mass, and I'd hazard almost no satellites have on-board sensors designed to detect approaching objects.

Consequently, the first signal you get is when your satellite goes dead or tracking telemetry shows it moving without command.

Which is vastly sneakier than a huge IR bloom from a known missile site for an anti-satellite missile launch (that also happens to look like an ICBM launch).

Edit: For precedent, Red Storm Rising (1986, Tom Clancy & Larry Bond, back when Clancy wrote more hard military thrillers and wasn't yet a name brand) discusses a then-current conflict between NATO and the USSR that features Soviet grappling satellites quietly taking out NATO space assets as part of a surprise first strike.

Yanking a satellite out of orbit avoids such collateral damage. Any practical weapon would need a lot of deltaV but Ion drives plus solar panels could be enough.

Instead if you position a bunch of "service" and "maintenance" satellites that are conveniently in orbits near enemy satellites (in terms of delta-V) then basically get to prestage the entire event before war actually breaks out.

There are plenty of satellites that basically spend time "near" unfriendly nations satellites. This is mostly for counter-intelligence as far as I can tell.

To disable an enemy satellite quietly one theory I heard was to simply carry a can of black spray paint aboard, then use it to coat the enemy satellite when you want to disable it. Anything optical would be disabled immediately. The satellite would probably overheat because the reflective coating would be gone.

Also, there have been rumors that a number of ‘dead’ satellites are actually spy satellites using the ‘dead’ status as cover, which maybe this could make no longer tenable with some plausible deniability?

Once you're close enough to interact with a satellite, you can also visually inspect or even retrieve it, which might yield useful information.

If you can grab and deorbit a satellite, you can also grab it and steal it to learn its secrets.

Retrieving whole defunct satellites is possible but only one or two at a time because of the huge amount of fuel needed to match orbits with each one. And once you've grabbed one it takes even more fuel to de-orbit it (which you'll notice didn't happen here). Don't forget that every maneuver you make as a spacecraft has to use extra fuel just to haul all the fuel for every future maneuver you'll ever do, and that compounds for every lifetime maneuver.

It's worthwhile to dispose of old satellites so they don't collide and produce debris clouds that are basically impossible to clean forever, but it's not funded.

1) It takes a ton of fuel to change your orbit once you're in space, and space is _really_ big (even just the orbital ranges we're talking about). It's just not currently feasible for a ship like that to capture debris and then use _more_ fuel to bring it back down.

2) Relative velocities of some debris are so large (and they are so spread out) that it's not yet feasible to capture it and bring it back with any current approach.

Dead satellites are mostly dangerous for the scattered debris they _might_ become if something hits them/they bread up. So while bringing them back is important, it's not as immediate a danger as things that have already broken up.

Basically, we don't have any approach that would make a major difference, even if money was no object (which it is).

I would be very surprised if strategic DoD satellites didn't have some kind of close-in defense capability to ward off any vehicles sniffing about.